dcfandomcom-20200222-history
Batman Vol 1 656
Supporting Characters: * * * * Antagonists: * ** ** ** Other Characters: * * * Darius Cage * Locations: * , Items: * * Vehicles: * | Notes = ]] * This issue is reprinted in the ''Batman and Son collected edition. * This issue is part of the Morrison's Batman saga. * Bruce has a flashback to spending Thanksgiving with Dick Grayson and "Aunt Agatha." This is a reference to an obscure Golden Age story about Bruce's seldom-referenced aunt. * Talia mentions that Ra's al Ghul is dead. This happened during Death and the Maidens. He is eventually resurrected during the aptly named The Resurrection of Ra's al Ghul. She also mentions her father choosing Bruce to produce his heir, which happened in one of their earliest adventures during Tales of the Demon. * This issue heavily retcons the story of Bruce and Talia's son. In Post-Crisis Pre-Zero Hour continuity, as told in Batman: Son of the Demon (1987), Talia and Bruce had consensual sex and she got pregnant. Bruce knew about her pregnancy, but she later lied and told him she had miscarried. Talia gave the baby to an orphanage, and he was adopted by an unnamed couple. In this story, the baby was never named. After Zero Hour (1994), Dennis O'Neil announced that this entire story had been retconned out of existence: Talia had never been pregnant and Bruce had no children. Two years later, Kingdom Come was published; in this story Bruce and Talia's adult son was named Ibn al Xu'ffasch, but (at the time) this was an Elseworlds story so it had no impact on continuity. After Infinite Crisis, Grant Morrison retconned the child back into existence, with altered details. As revealed in Batman #656, Talia had drugged Bruce and had sex with him in order to conceive a child as part of a eugenics experiment. Bruce never knew she was pregnant, and he didn't learn about Damian until years later. In Wizard magazine, Morrison admitted he simply got some of the details wrong.Wizard magazine #182 This change is explained in continuity as one of the many after-effects of Superboy-Prime punching reality. It's the same event that resurrected Jason Todd. | Trivia = * The title "Man-Bats of London" is a reference to the song . * Alfred is reading The Eternity Code, an Artemis Fowl novel by Eoin Colfer. This is a humorous reference as the butler in that series is an action hero who protects his master. * The pop-art paintings of comic book characters are largely unfamiliar, but one notable image is a portrait of Wonder Woman in the style of 's . * The woman Bruce tries to rescue is mentioned to be the 's wife. Her name is not given in-story, however at the time it would have been 's wife . * Talia mentions that she plans to hold the world hostage to a "new kind of terror." This is possibly foreshadowing her turn as the leader of a greater conspiracy. | Recommended = | Links = }}